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Quote of the Day: Nuclear Talks With Iran "Will Not Lead Anywhere"

Mother Jones

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From Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lowering expectations for the nuclear talks that start tomorrow in Vienna:

I am not optimistic about the negotiations. It will not lead anywhere, but I am not opposed either. What our foreign ministry and officials have started will continue and Iran will not violate its (pledge) … but I say again that this is of no use and will not lead anywhere.

Hmmm. Something tells me that when Khamenei says these negotiations won’t lead anywhere, it’s more than just an opinion. Probably more than just a suggestion, too. I think the Vegas odds on these talks just dropped through the floor.

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We can harvest methane from cow guts. Should we?

We can harvest methane from cow guts. Should we?

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Cows’ weird digestive systems, including four stomach compartments and the eternal chewing of cud, help them get the most out of their grassy diets — but it also produces a lot of methane. Controlling the methane is not easy once it gets burped or farted out of a cow’s digestive system. (Just ask the German farmers whose barn was recently blown up by a buildup of the gas.)

But now scientists have come up with a way of harvesting the climate-changing methane that they produce: by piping it directly out of their guts.

Cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by livestock. And livestock are responsible for nearly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down on their methane emissions could help slow global warming.

So Argentinian scientists are punching holes in the sides of cattle and passing pipes through to their stomachs. The other end of the pipe goes into a bag fitted on the cow’s back. The captured gas, which is basically the same natural gas that frackers and other drillers mine out of the ground, can be burned to produce energy. That releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere instead of the methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas.

The scientists have been developing the idea for more than five years, but they have received a burst of publicity following a Reuters article and a BBC report. “We believe that today it could be used in areas where conventional energies are not available,” Guillermo Berra of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology told the British broadcaster, speaking in Spanish. “We could have these animals produce, for example, the gas that you need for a refrigerator. A 100-liter capacity fridge can run … by the gas produced by one cow.”

Worried about how this makes the cows feel? The scientists say it’s harmless; they basically use body piercing technology. For cows that are increasingly being subjected to gruesome factory farming conditions, it would seem to be just one more inconvenience in an already brutal existence.


Source
Scientists harness cows’ ‘burp-power’ as alternative energy, BBC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Tar balls from wildfires worsening global warming

Tar balls from wildfires worsening global warming

lasconchasfire3

Tar ball central.

We’ve discussed at length how global warming can make wildfires worse. But here’s some more bad news: New research suggests that the fires themselves could be worsening global warming.

Forest fires release carbon from burned trees and leaves into the atmosphere. Some of that carbon is released as carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. But a lot of it is spewed into the air as soot and clumps of black carbon known as tar balls.

Soot doesn’t necessarily warm the globe — some if it can actually reflect heat from the sun back out to space. But tar balls warm the planet because they act like tiny heat traps, absorbing the sun’s rays.

Most climate models have assumed that the climate-warming and climate-cooling effects of soot and tar balls produced from wildfires more or less cancel each other out. But a new study published in the journal Nature Communications finds flaws with that assumption.

The researchers wanted to know what mixtures of soot and tar balls are being produced by American wildfires. So they used electron microscopes to study thousands of tiny particles produced by the 2011 Las Conchas fire, which at the time was the largest in New Mexico’s history.

They were surprised to discover that most of the particles were tar balls: For every 10 tar balls, they found just one soot particle.

From an article published by Los Alamos National Laboratory:

“We’ve found that substances resembling tar balls dominate, and even the soot is coated by organics that focus sunlight,” said senior laboratory scientist Manvendra Dubey. “Both components can potentially increase climate warming by increased light absorption.”

The Las Conchas fire emissions findings underscore the need to provide a framework to include realistic representation of carbonaceous aerosols in climate models, the researchers say. They suggest that fire emissions could contribute a lot more to the observed climate warming than current estimates show.

“The fact that we are experiencing more fires and that climate change may increase fire frequency underscores the need to include these specialized particles in the computer models, and our results show how this can be done,” Dubey said.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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NSA Has Been Hoovering Up Your Phone Records For Over a Decade

Mother Jones

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The NSA surveillance that Glenn Greenwald revealed last night has been in place since 2006:

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.

Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: “This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years.”

Neither Feinstein nor Chambliss said this, but the obvious inference from their statements is that this program isn’t limited to Verizon. It’s almost certainly a universal dragnet that applies to every phone service provider in the country. What’s more, we’ve known since 2005 that a similar program was put in place by President Bush in 2002. Basically, then, NSA has been hoovering up all the telephone metadata in the United States for the past 11 years.

So what now? Republicans loved this program back when Bush approved it. Congress basically gave it its official blessing in 2007. President Obama thinks it’s a great idea. And congressional leaders, who have known about this for a long time, mostly seem to be fine with it. I don’t know what the public thinks, but we’ll probably find out soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if public support is up around 70 percent or higher once everyone figures out what this program really does.

It’s disheartening as hell that we’ve come to this. But the problem is that, like it or not, it probably works. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) certainly thinks so, telling reporters today that the surveillance program helped thwart a “significant” case of domestic terrorism “within the last few years.” That’s going to be hard to fight. The vast majority of the American public seems to think this is a fair tradeoff, and aren’t really concerned with spy agencies having access to their phone records. (If it were the contents of their calls, that would probably be a different story.)

What we really need to know is whether there’s any evidence that NSA has abused the program. I’m not even sure what “abuse” would mean in this context, since they seem to have free rein in what they do with the data, but more information on that score could—maybe—turn public opinion around. Where’s the whistleblower who will fill us in on this?

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NSA Has Been Hoovering Up Your Phone Records For Over a Decade

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Debt Doesn’t Cause Low Growth. Low Growth Causes Low Growth.

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have been telling us for the past few years that high levels of government debt are bad for future growth. But is that true? There’s certainly a correlation between debt and growth, but is there causation? Or is there some third factor that causes both high debt and low growth?

There’s already some evidence from UMass economist Arindrajit Dube that R&R get the causality backward: It’s not that high debt causes low growth, but that low growth causes high debt. Today, Miles Kimball and Yichuan Wang of the University of Michigan take a closer look at this and try to tease out what’s causing what. To start with, using R&R’s dataset, they plot past growth rates vs. present debt for various time periods. This allows them to produce a formula that predicts debt levels based on past growth. Then they plot actual debt vs. predicted debt. The regression line running through the middle of the data tells us the average level of national debt you’d expect based on past growth rates:

Obviously some countries have higher debt than you’d expect based on their past growth, and some have lower debt. So the next question is: Do countries with higher than expected debt levels at a particular point in time have lower future growth than countries with lower than expected debt? If debt truly has an independent effect on growth, you’d certainly think so.

But it turns out this isn’t the case. Not even slightly. Debt simply doesn’t matter. Basically, low growth in the past predicts low growth in the future. That’s all there is to it. However, low growth in the past also predicts high debt, which can fool you into thinking it’s the debt that’s causing low growth in the future. But it’s not.

Now, Kimball and Wang are still no fans of high debt. If your debt is high compared to other countries, the bond markets will probably punish you. What’s more, “the big problem with debt is that the only ways to avoid paying it back or paying interest on it forever are national bankruptcy or hyper-inflation. And unless the borrowed money is spent in ways that foster economic growth in a big way, paying it back or paying interest on it forever will mean future pain in the form of higher taxes or lower spending.” It’s possible, of course, to spend money in ways that foster economic growth, but they believe that most conventional stimulus spending isn’t spent that way and therefore isn’t very useful.

Nonetheless, it isn’t harmful either. “Our bottom line from this analysis, and the thinking we have been able to articulate above, is this: Done carefully, debt is not damning. Debt is just debt.”

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WATCH: Does the IRS Scandal Mean Dark Money Groups Will Go Unchecked? Fiore Cartoon

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Does the IRS Scandal Mean Dark Money Groups Will Go Unchecked? Fiore Cartoon

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Dubious Dealings of Tea Party Groups Could Have Drawn IRS Scrutiny

Mother Jones

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Virtually everyone in Washington agrees on at least one thing about the IRS scandal: The tax agency’s trolling for tea party groups and giving extra scrutiny to their applications for nonprofit status was an egregious violation. Exactly how and why that conduct took place remains under investigation. But as conservatives in particular decry the IRS failure, it’s also worth considering the dubious fiscal history of some tea party groups, including their pursuit of non-profit status. While the IRS had absolutely no business profiling any groups based on political criteria, it is not blaming the victim to observe that scrutiny was warranted in specific cases—and they include some major tea party outfits and their leaders, documents show.

Indeed, despite the tea party’s emphasis on fiscal prudence in government, would-be nonprofit groups launched since the movement’s rise in 2009 have left a trail of tax-code shenanigans, infighting, and fiscal irresponsibility. Money raised by some groups was spent frivolously, and in some cases in ways that appeared to flout the tax rules barring nonprofits from political activity. There have been lawsuits between competing organizations over money, and tea party groups have disintegrated because of financial and other mismanagement.

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Dubious Dealings of Tea Party Groups Could Have Drawn IRS Scrutiny

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Study: When Republicans understand climate science, they support climate action

Study: When Republicans understand climate science, they support climate action

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What happens when Republicans start to understand climate change?

Republican voters are told over and over by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and GOP leaders in Congress that climate change is a sham, a scare campaign orchestrated by scientists with liberal agendas. Ergo, Republicans are less likely than others to believe that fossil-fuel burning is changing the climate. It stands to reason, therefore, that they are less likely to support efforts to tackle the problem.

But once Republicans come to understand that the world is indeed imperiled by global warming, they begin to support government actions to try to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Climatic Change. Researchers analyzed the results of a 2012 Gallup poll that asked around 1,000 Americans about their climate change views. From a Michigan State University press release:

U.S. residents who believe in the scientific consensus on global warming are more likely to support government action to curb emissions, regardless of whether they are Republican or Democrat, according to a study led by a Michigan State University sociologist.

However, a political divide remains on the existence of climate change despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists believe it is real, said Aaron M. McCright, associate professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Sociology.

The study, in the journal Climatic Change, is one of the first to examine the influence of political orientation on perceived scientific agreement and support for government action to reduce emissions.

“The more people believe scientists agree about climate change, the more willing they are to support government action, even when their party affiliation is taken into account,” McCright said. “But there is still a political split on levels of perceived scientific agreement, in that fewer Republicans and conservatives than Democrats and liberals believe there is a scientific consensus.”

The good news is that regular Republicans are starting to see through the lies of the fossil-fuel industry. About half of Republicans now agree that global warming is real, up from one-third in 2010, according to recent polling.

McCright’s research suggests that the burgeoning awareness of climate change among conservatives should translate to growing support for efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. If only it would happen more quickly.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Study: Pesticides Make Bees Forget the Smell of Food

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This story first appeared on the Guardian website.

Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar.

These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants.

The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations.

It has also been revealed that a separate government field study on the impact of the pesticides on bees was seriously compromised by contamination because the chemicals are so widespread in the environment.

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Study: Pesticides Make Bees Forget the Smell of Food

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Benefits Of Clean Green Energy

Most people these days are already looking for clean green energy to use, whether in residential or commercial areas. This is due to the fact that renewable sources can give a very significant solution to the needs of the people. This is most commonly associated with most environmental issues that each country is facing.

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The best thing about all these alternative solutions is that they are very friendly to the environment. They are very helpful to meet the needs of the people and keeping the safety of the environment. This means that the health of the humans will not be harmed in any way, but increase their productivity instead.

There is lesser cost needed for the operation of these systems. Compared to using gas, alternative forms are really more cost-efficient because the sources can just be found in nature. The only thing to do is to develop ways in which they can be benefited. It is also expected that the cost will continue to decline later on.

There is lesser maintenance to be done compared to other forms of energy. This is a very huge advantage since these days most of the maintenance cost requires purchasing various kinds of materials that are necessary to keep the system up and running. If they are not properly maintained, then disruptions will be experienced.

Since there is lesser maintenance needed, then it also means that the natural resources needed for maintaining them is a lot less than normal. In turn, this can help in saving the natural resources and avoid further usage that can eventually cause depletion. This is important in making sure that the environment is safe.

This is also important for sustainable source of energy. Because of those renewable resources, then it can sustain not only the use of the people these days, but also for good use in the years to come. This will still be accessible in the future, which is a very important factor for an efficient source for the next generations.

It has very little or no carbon emissions that cause greenhouse effect. There might be some parts of the machine used that are associated with harmful gases, but the volume is not enough to cause such a big pollution. Aside from that, the waste products are not the same with other sources that causes air pollution.

Because these alternate sources are based on the natural products of the environment, there is a higher chance that you can operate them even at such very small scale. It is much easier to get the supplies that you need in order to have them. Aside from that, you only depend on the resources that are being given by nature.

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There are really several benefits that you can get when using clean green energy. Increased use of natural resources will also help boost the economy of a place. Because there is greater control on the resources that will be used, it is a safe means that will also help avoid putting risks to the future generations.

You can get the latest details on solar energy instantly via the Web! If you have any questions or need further clarification about do it yourself energy, feel free to check out our recommended homepage now.

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